Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) NewsletterJanuary 23, 2002
All three of the top stories in this week's issue would normally go in my section of old news that I should have discovered earlier. I hope you'll agree that they are important enough to promote.
The Havana Declaration
In April 2001, two Latin American conferences on health science jointly issued the Declaration of Havana Towards Equitable Access to Health Information.
The Declaration opens with a strong statement of FOS principle: "[S]cientific-technical information is a global public good essential for social development, and...[its] universal and equitable dissemination should be assured by national and international public policies."
Another part of the declaration asserts that "the unjust, unnecessary and avoidable" health differences among individuals and groups are due in part to "inequitable access to health information and knowledge".
The remedy for both health inequalities and poverty is political participation, which in turn depends on "access to information and communication".
Apart from the statement of principle, one purpose of the declaration is to elicit world-wide support for the Virtual Health Library, a free online source of health information.
Declaration of Havana Towards Equitable Access to Health Information(Thanks to Jan Velterop.)
Virtual Health Library / Biblioteca Virtual en Salud
* The declaration was issued by the participants in the following two conferences.
Second Regional Coordination Meeting of the Virtual Health Library
V Regional Congress on Health Sciences Information
* Postscript. The Havana Declaration is an exemplary reminder that FOS doesn't merely accelerate research. If it did, FOS would be of merely academic interest. By accelerating research, FOS accelerates the benefits of research, such as health care. By spreading knowledge, FOS spreads the benefits of knowledge, such as informed political participation.
The Street Performer Protocol
In the June 1999 issue of _First Monday_, John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier proposed a simple new method to fund FOS. Readers or institutions with means and good will, and interested in seeing a certain work finished and freely available, place donations in escrow. The funds are released to the author when the work is put into the public domain. Kelsey and Schneier call this the Street Performer Protocol (SPP).
Actually, they didn't propose the SPP in order to fund FOS. They wanted to fund works for which authors expected profit, like novels, music CDs, and movies. If the profit from these works is drained by copyright violators, then we need new inducements to keep creators creating. The SPP is designed to fill this need.
Kelsey and Schneier were trying to solve a problem that has greatly decreased in urgency since 1999. In 1999 it seemed that the internet would kill copyright by enabling users to copy and distribute digital literature and music ad lib. Today the aggressive legal and technical protection schemes of the content industry are far more conspicuous and newsworthy than their occasional penetration by hackers. But don't conclude that Kelsey and Schneier were myopic. It's precisely because smart people in 1999 saw the internet as the death of copyright that the behemoth motion picture and music industries mobilized to buy legislation to save their assets. It's precisely because legislatures (and international organizations like WIPO) rolled over for these industries that the future of digital copyright has turned 180 degrees since 1999. It's precisely because the view from 1999 caused a hugely funded sector of the economy to panic, which in turn persuaded legislators to panic, that copyright law no longer balances the interests of publishers and readers, but gives everything to publishers.
Kelsey and Schneier briefly draw an analogy between the SPP and the funding model for public television, an analogy that shows the FOS connection most clearly. In both cases, some donors pay for all users. In both cases, some up-front funding makes the output free for all. In both cases, donations cover dissemination fees so that the content may be disseminated without charging access fees (see FOSN for 1/1/02).
There are endless ways to modify the SPP, and Kelsey and Schneier suggest many themselves. One they don't mention is to require free online access without requiring the public domain. This variation would be more comfortable to most scholars, who want a legal basis to stop plagiarists, ensure proper citation, and prevent the publication of mangled versions of their work. Public TV also suggests this variation. Street performances are in the public domain, but Sesame Street isn't. The Public Library of Science takes a middle ground, and wants scientists to hold the copyright to their articles but grant an irrevocable license to the public domain.
There are two reasons to resurrect this excellent 1999 essay. The first is that the SPP or public TV model is still worth trying. It isn't only for an era in which copyright is circling the drain. It isn't only for creators who hope to profit from their creations. It isn't only for street performers, who don't need much subsidy. It also works for expensive propositions like public TV, whose operating costs far exceed those of any scholarly journal. It needn't be the model for every FOS provider, but it might work for some.
The second reason is to be reminded of how quickly copyright law was amended to squash the threat perceived to arise from the internet. How quickly can copyright law be brought back into balance? Unfortunately, no heavily funded industry is lobbying Congress to make this happen, just a loose coalition of academics, librarians, music fans, intellectual property law professors, and civil libertarians. Some of them represent a model of music distribution that (whatever its merits) Congress has already rejected. Some represent the future of research.
John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier, The Street Performer Protocol
Public Library of Science licensing agreement
* Postscript. We might return to the days when the future of copyright looks very bleak. If we do, it will be through changes in technology, not changes in law. And of course these changes in technology are perfectly conceivable. It was technology, not law, that grounded the 1999 forecast that the internet would kill copyright. Copyright law has since caught up and now prohibits the threatening circumvention technologies. Moreover, copyright law is fortified by increasingly sophisticated technologies of its own. But on the other side, circumvention technologies continue to spread through the network of users and continue to match the copy-protectors in sophistication. The war is not over; on the contrary, it is escalating. In this arms race, if the circumventionists are more clever than the anti-circumventionists, even if copyright law is unchanged by Congress and courts, then the future of copyright might again look as it did in 1999. If the anti-circumventionists are more clever, however, or if their friends in prosecutors' offices are diligent, we might go further back, roughly to 1984.
More on cross-border censorship
On November 20, 2000, a French court ruled that French laws against hate speech prohibit Yahoo from selling Nazi artifacts on auction pages served to French citizens. Just about a year later, November 7, 2001, a U.S. court ruled that it would be unconstitutional for any U.S. court to enforce a French restraint on U.S. speech (see FOSN for 11/16/01). The French plaintiffs have appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (see FOSN for 12/12/01); the appeal is still pending and we'll hear more about it in due course. Remember that the law being hammered out here isn't just about online auctions that cross national boundaries. It's about offensive content of any kind that crosses national boundaries, such as online scholarship about Tiananmen Square, sexuality, or evolution. It affects scholars as much as antique dealers.
I recently learned that in October 2001, the Council of Europe was already crafting another sort of response to cases of cross-border offense. In October, the Council of Europe proposed to protect nations like France with a protocol that prohibits hate speech and introduces a new method of stopping it. Some signers of the protocol (call them "Type A" countries) might agree to the binding prohibition of hate speech. Other signers ("Type B" countries) might have strong free-speech rules incompatible with the binding prohibition of hate speech and could sign a weaker clause of the agreement. The protocol would prevent Type B countries from disseminating hate speech from internet sites within their jurisdiction "aimed exclusively at an audience in a less permissive state", i.e. an audience in a Type A country. See Document 9263, Section II.E.16 (link below).
Of course this wouldn't reverse the Nazi auction decision unless the U.S. signed on to the new protocol. But what's interesting is the two-tiered strategy: prohibit hate speech in one kind of country and in other countries prohibit hateful broadcasts "aimed exclusively" at nations of the first kind. The second tier allows more freedom than the first (broadcasts to other audiences, broadcasts to one's own citizens), and consequently may tempt nations to sign on that would not have signed on to a monolithic strategy of prohibition.
The problem with the second tier is that it tells nations whose free-speech rules aren't compatible with a ban on hate speech: don't use your freedom to offend people protected by censorship elsewhere. Or, don't take advantage of your freedom or let citizens of censored countries take advantage of your freedom. Will a nation whose free-speech rules are so strong that they do not permit the prohibition of hate speech agree to cooperate with censorship in other countries? Time will tell.
The protocol doesn't exactly say that citizens of less free countries wouldn't benefit from broadcasts from the more free countries, but it does try to ban a subset of those broadcasts in deference to the lawmakers who have decided that less freedom is better than more. In short, it puts sovereignty ahead of freedom. How many countries with strong free-speech rules will do the same?
Document 9263, proposing the new protocol(Thanks to GILC Alert.)
Priced online scholarship newsletter
I often cover developments in priced online scholarship. Sometimes these developments are relevant to the broad topic of the newsletter ("how the internet is transforming scholarly research and publication") even if not to the narrow topic ("free online scholarship"). Sometimes they count as progress over the recent past, even if not yet free. Sometimes it helps to know what the other side is doing to thwart progress or delay the inevitable.
This week there are more stories than usual from the priced side of the line. If I ran them as ordinary FOS news items, I'd run the risk of making the newsletter look like it had changed its mission. So I'm putting them in this special section where they can conveniently be ignored or deleted. --I'm also thinking that the newsletter is getting too long to include any of these stories in the future, unless there is some special reason to include them or it's a dry news week.
* On January 18, Elsevier Science announced that institutions could now subscribe to its ScienceDirect journals in electronic form only, if they choose. Until now, institutions had to subscribe to the print edition to get the online edition. When Elsevier acquired Harcourt General last year, it acquired the Academic Press journals, 175 of which are also part of the new "E-Choice" electronic-only offer. The remaining Academic Press journals will be part of ScienceDirect and E-Choice by May.
* ebrary has launched ebrarian 2.0 with selected customers. The new version integrates better with other library management software and removes limitations on the number of patrons who may view the same content simultaneously. ebrary gives users free access for reading (partially subsidized by the institutional subscriber), but charges users for printing or copying. A large number of academic and university presses provide electronic editions of their books through ebrary.(Thanks to NewsLink.)
* Gale and ingenta have agreed to support a common search engine to range over their two collections of online journals. This could mean that users could search over 10,000 journals in all, though the total for a given search will depend on the licenses held by the user's institution. The new search engine will be called InfoTrac Plus and will launch this summer. Viewing full-text hits will require an institutional license or pay-per-view. The press release doesn't make clear whether searching without reading will be free.(Thanks to NewsLink.)
* The Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) and Scoop ReprintSource have formed a joint venture. Publishers using CCC's DRM software, RightsLink, can let their users order reprints directly from Scoop --at a price, of course.(Thanks to Online Publishing News.)
* Infotrieve has signed up the American Psychological Association, Gordon and Breach, and Thieme. Infotrieve users may now order pay-per-view articles from all these publishers.
* OCLC has three new digitization services: the Digital & Preservation Co-op, the Digital Archive, and the Digital & Preservation Resources Centers.(Thanks to NewsLink.)
Digital & Preservation Co-op("Co-op participants will work together to develop educational resources on standards and best practices for digitization and preservation and to provide access to a growing body of networked digital collections worldwide.")
Digital Archive("Choose the type of storage you need for each collection. Retain the rights to your collection. Assure long-term preservation. Rely on standards-based archiving to ensure long-term access. Reduce the costs....")
Digital & Preservation Resources Centers("Services range from basic reformatting to metadata creation, text conversion and mark-up and delivery of web-ready packages of digital collections.")
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Developments
* SciDev.net is a new non-profit free online source of science news and research "relevant to sustainable development and the social and economic needs of developing countries". It's an outgrowth of a web site hosted by _Nature_ since 1999. In its new incarnation it was launched on December 3, co-sponsored by _Nature_ and _Science_, in association with the Third World Academy of Sciences.(Thanks to Paul Pival.)
* Starting this month, the full-text of _Physics Today Online_ (PTO) will be accessible only to members of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). Only selected parts of the online journal will be freely accessible to all. Neither the PTO nor AIP web sites explains the new policy.(Thanks to Serials eNews.)
* JISC has launched the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR), a program to support access to institutional content in higher education. It is currently soliciting proposals from UK institutions. It prefers projects that use the harvesting of metadata to support data services. The proposal deadline is February 28.
* JISC has also launched Exchange for Learning (X4L), a program to take advantage of earlier investments in digital academic content by making it available for learning (as opposed to research). Like FAIR, X4L is also soliciting proposals with a deadline of February 28.
* HighWire Press now supports a Topic Map, a graphical browsing tool that lets you navigate through the HighWire contents (301 full-text journals) by viewing all the indexed topics as colored boxes and their connections to one another as gray lines. Click on a topic and it moves to the center of the window, surrounded by its sub-topic and super-topics. Double-click on a topic and it opens in your larger browser window. The software is from Inxight (see FOSN for 8/23/01 and 11/9/01). Definitely cool.(Thanks to eLib.)
* eXist is an open source XML database. The code for version 0.7 has now been released and may be downloaded from the site.(Thanks to El.pub Weekly.)
* The Computer Systems Policy Project (CSPP) has issued a public statement seeking a balance between copyright owners and consumers in the further evolution of copyright law and DRM software (FOSN for 10/26/01). (PS: The CSPP is backed by heavyweights like IBM, Intel, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett Packard, and Motorola. If you think that these companies have an interest in one-sided DRM, to protect their own IP, realize that this is one issue on which the content and entertainment industries are much more radical than the technology industry, forcing tech associations to speak for moderation.)(Thanks to C-FIT.)
* In this year's Internet Villain competition, the only three nominees are government agencies. The contest is sponsored by the UK's ISP industry. (PS: When will the U.S. have its own version of this contest?)
Matt Looney's ZDNet story on the contest
The Internet Villain contest
* China now holds ISP's responsible for subversive political content on web sites and in private emails. ISP's must turn "sensitive" content over to authorities and delete any web content on prohibited topics. Among the prohibited content is anything that hurts China's reputation. (PS: Hence, the new ruling will not be announced on Chinese web sites.)(Thanks to Freedom News.)
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New on the net
* Public Knowledge now has its own web site. (It formerly had a section of David Bollier's site.) PK describes itself as "a public-interest advocacy organization dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant 'information commons' --the shared information resources and cultural assets that we own as a people." Among its FOS-related projects are making copyright law serve art, culture, democracy, and science.
Public Knowledge home page(Thanks to Doug Bennett.)
Public Knowledge projects
* Ken Frazier of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, libraries, has written an open letter to UW faculty explaining why the library must cancel some journals. It's an excellent introduction to the serials pricing crisis for faculty who haven't quite tuned in yet. The letter closes with some suggestions about how faculty can help alleviate the problem.(Thanks to the ERIL list.)
* Gerry McKiernan has launched IDEALS, "A Registry of Emerging Innovative Augmented Digital Library Services". This is categorized list of links to digital library services designed to help patrons find, use, and manipulate digital information.(Thanks to the lis-elib list.)
* The proceedings of the NISO Workshop on Networked Reference Services (Washington DC, April 25-26) are now online.
* A report summarizing the April/May 2001 workshop on ebooks in Australian libraries is now online.(Thanks to NewsAgent.)
* El.pub Weekly has put online its summary of electronic publishing initiatives and funding opportunities under the EU's 5th Framework Programme. (PS: If you've been baffled or deterred by the sheer size of the 5th Framework Programme, this is a good overview.)
* Peter Ludlow has put online 29 of the 33 essays from his print anthology, _High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace_ (MIT Press, 1996), plus most of the prefatory matter, all the appendices, and 33 supplementary readings not in the print edition.(Thanks to C-FIT.)
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Share your thoughts
* Last week I reported that the Gates Foundation had picked CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) to administer its annual million dollar award, Access to Learning. This week CLIR seeks applicants and nominations for the award. Nominees should be libraries or comparable organizations, outside the U.S., that have been "innovative in providing free public access to information". The deadline is April 15.
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In other publications
* In a January 25 story in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Scott Carlson describes how the Supreme Court's June decision in New York Times v. Tasini (FOSN for 7/17/01) has affected scholarship. Rather than pay freelance writers to make their print stories accessible in electronic archives, many newspapers are simply deleting the stories from their online archives. As a result, the newspaper archives are now much less reliable for scholars. Quoting David Kennedy, professor of history at Stanford: "This was exactly the fear of those of us who signed the [amicus] brief [for the publishers] --that this would create an inferior online source." Stanley Katz, professor of history at Princeton, supported the writers but agrees that the outcome has been "devastating....Oh God, it's just terrible....The people who are worst hit are the social scientists." Historians studying a particular region can still travel to that region to read paper archives, but historians and other social scientists trying to compare many regions have little choice but to use the electronic archives. Steven Tepper, also of Princeton, has been studying controversies about artworks in many different cities: the post-Tasini purge "really biases the results --the difference between 12 cases and eight cases can be really important when you're doing statistical analysis." Most newspapers contacted by the _Chronicle_ would not even provide a list of which articles they have deleted from their online archives.
* In the January 23 _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Jeffrey Young describes the initiative by the Big 10 and University of Chicago to distribute ebooks and ejournals published by any member to all the other members free of charge (FOSN for 12/26/01). (PS: If a dozen universities can make this agreement, why can't 1,000? Why not an open "treaty" that admits new signatories at any time?)
* In the January 21 _O'Reilly Network_, Richard Koman interviews Brewster Kahle, creator of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.(Thanks to Gary Price's VASND.)
* In the January 21 issue of _The New Yorker_, James Surowiecki reflects on the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, other recent acts of aggression against the public domain, and Lawrence Lessig's attempt to mobilize opposition to them.(Thanks to The Filter from the Berkman Center.)
* In a January 17 article posted to the _O'Reilly Network_, Andy Oram reviews the state of 2600 Magazine's legal prospects in light of its recent defeat in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. 2600 was found guilty of violating the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause for publishing the DeCSS source code and linking to other sites that did the same (see FOSN for 12/5/01). This is one of the best accounts of the DMCA for non-lawyers I've seen --perhaps because it agrees with my view that the anti-circumvention clause cannot be construed as "content neutral".(Thanks to the Cyber-Rights list.)
* In the January 16-17 _Planet PDF_, there are two articles of interest to those studying the history of PDF.
Bernd Zipper's interview with John Warnock on the past, present, and future of PDF
An electronic reprint of John Warnock's 1991 essay on "Camelot", the technology that became Adobe/PDF
* In the January 15 _Open Source Schools_, Patrick Bryant describes how he's combining homegrown open source software and public domain texts for his Ph.D. dissertation in English literature. He's making an electronic edition of Emily Dickinson's correspondence. "One important goal for the project is to establish a loose set of recommendations and protocols for how to create similar editions and make them inter-operable."
* In a January 15 article in _United Press International_, Sam Vaknin explores the future of ebooks, especially in light of the recent demise of many ebook publishers. "Paradoxically, e-publishing's main hope may lie with its ostensible adversary: the library. Unbelievably, e-publishers actually tried to limit the access of library patrons to e-books. But, libraries are not only repositories of knowledge and community centers, they are also dominant promoters of new knowledge technologies. They are already the largest buyers of e-books."
* In a January 9 note from EPS, David Worlock gives a positive review of the BioMed Central method of funding free online access to its journals. The funding model "has several neat effects....[It] provides additional value to institutions, which they can offer to researchers who they seek to recruit, and provides an inducement to publish that aligns with the institution's needs as well as the individual's career requirements. And, of course, it preserves the free and open access policy which is clearly close to contributor/user perceptions of good practice."(Thanks to LibLicense.)
* In the January 7-14 issue of _The Nation_, Mark Crispin Miller identifies the 10 largest media corporations and exactly what properties they own. (PS: If you thought media consolidation was incendiary hype, this will be an eye opener.)(Thanks to The Filter from the Berkman Center.)
* The January issue of _D-Lib Magazine_ contains several FOS-related articles.
Suzana Sukovic reports that libraries are increasingly involved in text encoding projects. She argues that, despite appearances, this is congruent with traditional library roles, improves the functionality of texts, and aids information retrieval.
William Arms and seven co-authors describe NSDL (National SMETE Digital Library) and the lessons learned in implementing it to date. They argue that interoperability can be achieved among cooperating sites if all adopt the same standard, but that this is difficult to arrange. For a heterogeneous collection of collections, like NSDL, it makes sense to achieve interoperability at some "levels" and not necessarily at others. Movement to higher levels can take place over time as costs drop or incentives rise. (The OAI standard is one of the lower levels and they recommend it as a minimum.)
Tony Gill points out that there are many digitization projects, but little harmony of digitization standards. He describes the joint effort by UKOLN, CIMI, and Re:source to work out international digitization standards.
Hilary Berthon and two co-authors describe the Safekeeping project, a subset of PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) in which selected resources on digital preservation are themselves preserved in a distributed, permanent collection.
Michael Nelson and B. Danette Allen wanted to know how well digital libraries support long-term access to their contents. They picked 20 digital libraries (some leading FOS archives like PubMed and CogPrints) and 50 digital objects from each library. Then they set a robot to check the availability of each object three times a week for a year. At the end of the year, 31 objects, or 3.1%, had become unavailable. The article breaks down the results by library. (PS: I'm sure the authors are right that this rate of loss is, as it ought to be, lower for digital libraries than for the general web. But is 3% a year a disturbingly high number for digital libraries, or a reassuringly low number? What do you think?)PS: Nelson and Allen don't give comparable data on the loss rate for the general web, perhaps because no one has collected these data yet. The closest study I've seen is the OCLC analysis of "IP address volatility" for 1998-2000. OCLC put the rate at about 45% per year.
* In the January issue of _American Libraries_, David Dorman writes about the rapid rise of OpenURL. SFX has made it popular. NISO likes it. Openly Informatics likes it. OCLC likes it. A growing list of commercial publishers like it. It even has a theme song.(Thanks to Shelflife.)
OK, I wanted to find the OpenURL theme song too. But when I clicked on the link, I found two full-length videos without helpful labels. Sorry, I'm too busy to run this story to the ground. (There goes my Pulitzer.) If you find a better URL, please let me know.
* In January, Steven Clift put online a revised version of his July speech to the International World Futurist Society, "The Future of E-Democracy: The 50 Year Plan."(Thanks to C-FIT.)
* In the December issue of _Policy Perspectives_, the Knight Higher Education Collaborative has written a summary of its March 2001 conference, Roundtable on Scholarly Communication in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The conference was sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), National Humanities Alliance (NHA), and the Knight Collaborative. The shortest way to characterize this piece is to say that it's the best single article I've seen on the special FOS issues faced by the humanities and social sciences, and the reasons why most FOS initiatives are concentrated in the natural sciences or STM fields.
Abstract of "Op. Cit."(If this doesn't take you directly to it, click on the online catalog for _Policy Perspectives_ and then on the first article in the list.)
Full-text of "Op. Cit."(Free registration required. Go the abstract, above, for the registration option.)
ARL press release on the article(Thanks to LibLicense.)
* In a recent but undated article in _Physics Today_, Spencer Weart tells the story of the Center for the History of Physics, a print library with a growing free online collection.
Spencer Weart, Preserving the Heritage of Discovery
The Center for the History of Physics
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Following up
* Last week I quoted a line from a January 6 D.C. Denison article in the _Boston Globe_: "The Internet may be the world's greatest library, but let's face it: All of the books are scattered on the floor." Now I find that in a December 17 column posted to his web site, Gerry McGovern used a similar line: "Unfortunately, the Web is a library that very often has the books on the floor and the lights turned out." Did Denison copy from McGovern? Is this a commonplace that I never heard before? I'm not asking because I suspect plagiarism, but because I like the line.
McGovern's 12/17/01 column(Thanks to Shelflife.)
* Last week I wrote about Golan v. Ashcroft, a challenge to two provisions of U.S. copyright law that shrink the public domain. In November, David Horrigan profiled the co-plaintiffs in the case, Lawrence Golan and Richard Kapp, for the _National Law Journal_. If you didn't believe that rules of law enforceable in the U.S. could actually withdraw works from the public domain and grant them retroactive copyrights, then read this. Golan and Kapp are orchestral conductors. Kapp used to be able to buy sheet music for works by Stravinsky and Shostakovich for under $100 per work. Now that these works have been yanked from the public domain and retro-copyrighted, he can't buy them at all and can't rent them for less than $1,000 per work. Since the rental period is only for one performance, this amounts to $1000 per work per performance, which essentially excludes these works from the repertoires of small orchestras.(Thanks to The Filter, from the Berkman Center.)
* In FOSN for 1/8/02, I wrote about the FOS recommendations produced in July 2001 by a working group of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). Here is a web site on the IUPAP's November 2001 meeting to follow-up the July recommendations. Note especially the recommended reading list for meeting participants and Arthur Smith's subsequent report on the November meeting.
* In FOSN for 12/26/01, I reported on David McOwen, who faced 120 years in prison for installing distributed.net software on his university's network. The software harnesses unused CPU cycles to make a distributed supercomputer for computationally intensive scientific problems. The prosecutor has been persuaded to back off, though not completely. McOwen will receive one year of probation, pay $2100 in restitution, and perform 80 hours of community service.
* In FOSN for 12/5/01, I reported that the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) had revised its guidelines for measuring the usage of electronic journals. Now Elsevier has endorsed the ICOLC guidelines.
Elsevier press release(Thanks to the DigLib list.)
The ICOLC guidelines
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Catching up (old news I should have discovered earlier)
* Because open source is an important kind of software, it's also a growing topic of scholarship. MIT hosts the Open Source Research Community, an online registry of scholars interested in the open source and free software movements, and a free online archive of their scholarship.(Thanks to C-FIT.)
* O'Reilly Computer Books sponsors the Open Books Project, a free online collection of out-of-print books in computer science in English, French, and German. Most of them were published by O'Reilly, which has adopted the policy that when a book goes OP, it should enter the public domain.(Thanks to The Filter from the Berkman Center.)
Tim O'Reilly's argument that out-of-print books and software no longer maintained by its manufacturer should enter the public domain. (PS: A great argument. Of course I hope it is applied to OP books. But I confess that I'm most eager to have Netmanage apply it to Ecco Pro, the single most useful piece of software I've ever used.)
* The Western European Studies Section of the ACRL has a directory of free online literary texts from 17 language groups.
* In March 2001, Linda Beebe reviewed four online peer review systems: Global Editor, Manuscript Central, PaperWeb, and Rapid Review.
* I just discovered that since September, FOSN has been a "featured journal" at the e-journals directory of electronic journals.
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Corrections
* In the last issue I inadvertently gave the same URL for two articles from the January/February issue of _CLIR Issues_. Here are the correct URLs. (Thanks to Karyn Popham for pointing out the error.)
Deanna Marcum, "A National Plan for Digital Preservation: What Does it Mean for the Library Community?"
Jerry George, "DLF Form Participants Ask: Can Libraries Keep Up with Users?"
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No comment
* On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (January 21), James Swanson wrote in an article for the Cato Institute: "Ignoring intellectual property rights, a cornerstone of the liberty Martin Luther King, Jr. fought to secure, is an inauspicious way to celebrate his birthday."(Thanks to Freedom News.)
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Conferences
If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your observations with us through our discussion forum.
* Changing Business Models for Journal PublishingLondon, January 24
* Intellectual Property and New Business Creation from Science and TechnologyOxford, January 27 - February 1
* Secure electronic publishing and data protectionLondon, January 30
* CIMI Institute Forum. New Developments in Standards for Digital PreservationWashington, D.C., January 31
* EBLIDA workshop on the national implementation of the EU copyright directive.London, February 1
* High Quality Information For Everyone And What It CostsBielefeld, February 5-7
* International Conference on Bioinformatics 2002: North-South NetworkBangkok, February 6-8
* E-volving Information futuresMelbourne, February 6-8
* Kongress für digitale InhalteWiesbaden, February 7-8
* Book Tech 2002New York, February 11-13
* Society for Scholarly Publishing, Top Management Roundtable. Successful Publishing in the Global Environment.Washington, D.C., February 13-14
* ICSTI Seminar on Digital Preservation of the Record of ScienceParis, February 14-15
* Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational LinguisticsMexico City, February 17-23
* Wissensmanagement im universitären BereichFebruary 19-20
* Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge SystemsSchloß Salzau, February 19-23
* Fifth International Publishers Association Copyright ConferenceAccra, Ghana, February 20-22
* Integrating @ Internet Speed: Strategies for the Content Community [conference on reference linking]Philadelphia, February 24-27
* Getting your message across: How learned societies and other organizations can influence public and government opinionLondon, February 25
* Electronic Journals --Solutions in Sight?London, February 25-26
* [Public lecture], Will Thomas and Ed Ayers, "The Next Generation of Digital Scholarship: An Experiment in FormWashington, D.C., February 27
* A Symposium on the Research Value of Printed Materials in the Digital AgeCollege Park, Maryland, March 1
* International Spring School on the Digital Library and E-publishing for Science and TechnologyGeneva, March 3-8
* Search Engine StrategiesBoston, March 4-5
* Towards an Information Society for AllBerlin, March 8-9
* 17th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. Special tracks on Database and Digital Library Technologies; Electronic Books for Teaching and Learning; and Information Access and RetrievalMadrid, March 10-14
* Digitization for Cultural Heritage Professionals: An Intensive ProgramChapel Hill, North Carolina, March 10-15
* EUSDIC Spring Meeting. E-Content: Divide or RuleParis, March 11-12
* Knowledge Technologies Conference 2002Seattle, March 11-13
* Computers in Libraries 2002Washington D.C., March 13-15
* International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual DataSt. Malo, March 13-15
* The Electronic Publishers Coalition (EPC) conference on ebooks and epublishing (obscurely titled, Electronically Published Internet Connection, or EPIC)Seattle, March 14-16
* Digital Resources and International Information Exchange: East-WestMarch 15 (Washington DC), 18 (Flushing NY), 20 (Stamford CT)
* Internet Librarian International 2002London, March 18-20
* The New Information Order and the Future of the ArchiveEdinburgh, March 20-23
* Advanced Licensing WorkshopDallas, March 20-22
* Electronic Publishing StrategyLondon, March 22
* OCLC Institute. Steering by Standards. (A series of satellite videoconferences.)Cyberspace. OAI, March 26. OAIS, April 19. Metadata standards in the future, May 29.
* WebSearch UniversitySan Francisco, March 25-26; Stamford CT, April 30 - May 1; Washington DC, September 23-24; Chicago, Octeober 22-23; Dallas, November 19-20.
* European Colloquium on Information Retrieval ResearchGlasgow, March 25-27
* e-Content: Discovering and Delivering ValueToronto, March 25-27
* New Developments in Digital LibrariesCiudad Real, Spain, April 2-3
* The New Information Order and the Future of the ArchiveEdinburgh, March 20-23
* Copyright Management in Higher Education: Ownership, Access and ControlAdelphi, Maryland, April 4-5
* International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and ComputingLas Vegas, April 8-10
* NetLab and Friends: 10 Years of Digital Library DevelopmentLund, April 10-12
* International Learned Journals Seminar: We Can't Go On Like This: The Future of JournalsLondon, April 12
* SIAM International Conference on Data MiningArlington, Virginia, April 11-13
* Creating access to information: EBLIDA workshop on getting a better deal from your information licencesThe Hague, April 12
* United Kingdom Serials Group Annual Conference and ExhibitionUniversity of Warwick, April 15- 17
* EDUCAUSE Networking 2002Washington, D.C., April 17-18
* Museums and the Web 2002Boston, April 17-20
* Information, Knowledges and Society: Challenges of A New EraHavana, April 22-26
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